How Amazon is destroying the user experience through heavy-handed advertising
This Washington Post article, “It’s not your imagination: Shopping on Amazon has gotten worse”, assesses the problems Amazon is facing as the pressure for revenue leads it to rely more and more on advertising: the shopping experience suffers when users, increasingly find their search and shopping page has been converted into a jungle of advertising, product reviews and biased search results, sold to the highest bidder. That the article in question was, moreover, published in a media outlet owned by the company’s founder, adds further irony.
Jeff Bezos hated advertising: now, Amazon is the leader in advertising spending in the United States, invoicing more than $31 billion a year, and although it is still a long way behind companies like Google or Facebook, which are the first two, it occupies the third position and the industry is watching it closely. Many advertisers change their target and divert part of their Google budgets to the shopping giant, marking a trend that seems increasingly clear: the closer your ad is to the last click that triggers the purchase, the better.
The same goes for influencers: Amazon is proving itself to be the best platform on which to recommend products and is arguably most likely to monetize those recommendations for whoever makes them. Every day, hundreds…
